This post is unusual in that it neither about travel nor even about something that has happened yet. This weekend I'll be attending the 141st Annual Session of the Illinois State Grange. The Patrons of Husbandry is an organization to which I've belonged my entire life, but have not been active in a number of years, since there were so few Granges still active in Minnesota. It is an organization whose original purpose is long past, but my fondness for the past and in particular my preference for aspects of a pre-industrial age make me long for its pastoral rituals and pleasures. I suppose the source of this affection is the same that fuels me affection for the scenes in Thomas Hardy novels.At any rate, as part of the annual event are a number of contests sponsored by the Lecturer, including creative writing activities. My father has written a lovely poem in his inimitable style and I have written a piece for the short essay contest. The theme, My Favorite Season, was specified as were length requirements. So I just want to share the essay here:
My Favorite Season
The season of the changing year are perhaps the elements in our physical environment that best symbolize our humanity. The cycle from birth to adolescence to adulthood to death is almost too obviously rehearsed each year in the transition in turn from the promise of spring rebirth to the robust vigor of summer to the mature richness of autumn to the fragility of winter's cold. But it is autumn in particular that binds the inevitability of death with the sweetness of life. The vitality of autumn harvest in all its bounteous excess gains its beauty from the imminent frost that will bring it all to a close.
Some of my most vivid memories surround those last moments before frost. I remember in particular an episode from childhood that etched this marriage of life and death in my young mind. It was the evening that arrives each October when one instinctively recognizes a frost is likely, even without listening to the weather forecast. We had already gathered all the green tomatoes, picked those lima beans that showed any hint of plumpness, and taken in the coleus slips. That year, as often was the case, our watermelons were so late as to still be in the field ripening, and we were faced with the question of what to do with them. The sheer mass of the melons and the likelihood that most of them were not prime made bringing them into the cellar impracticable. On the other hand, to leave any rich, sweet meon to be abandoned to the frost seemed a tragedy. So in the twilight of that chilly evening, we gathere in the malon patch as my mother wielded an ol d butcher knife to cut open the melons, handing pieces that wee ripe enough to eat to my brothers and me. In the fading sunlight filtering through the overhanging branches of the ancient pecan trees nearby, we bit into those pink slices, feeling the cold, sweet juice run down our chins into our flannel work clothes, reckless casing aside among th fallen leaves any melons that were immature or overripe. No melon in my memory has ever been as sweet as those we ate in the twilight glow, the final moments of that farm year.
This memory and others that echo the simultaneous vitality and fragility of human existence ultimaely make autumn my favorite season.
